This place has roughly 3,000 people and was intended to be an entire replacement for DaystromInstitute and StarTrek as they were going dark indefinitely. Well, within 4 days the moderators have walked back those statements and opened both subreddits up. I see no incentive for people to come to this website now and while a few may come here in the future, most people will go to r/startrek with 600,000 people.
I’m totally out of my element as far as this community goes and wondered in here from sorting by all, but I won’t be going back to reddit for the reasons you said and then some.
It seems to me enough of the core/healthy users and mods have had enough that the site is going to devolve into a cesspool of hate, bots/spam, circlejerks, and more hate.
It’s the core subreddit members who drive significant portions of content that are leaving. It’s the users who actually go out of their way to report off-topic/rule-breaking content. The ones who always check for/report dropship scammers. These are the users getting fed up and leaving.
It’s the unhealthy users who are going to stay. The kind of mindless drones who upvote content regardless of whether it’s in the appropriate thread. I’ve witnessed an alarming trend over the years of anti-intellectualism and hypersensitivity mixed with aggression spreading on reddit. The site is already going down the drain.
Now the mods are about to lose most of their tools (from 3rd party apps of course!) and are being removed by the reddit admin to reopen subs. Many mods are maliciously noncomplying. Some talk about just not moderating their comunities at all anymore. When the mods leave in droves (which is already happening) is when we’ll start to see reddit deteriorate more.
Reddit itself isn’t going anywhere, and neither is most of their userbase. But their quality is going to plummet. Regardless, I’m happier here even if our communities are smaller for a while. That will just make them more close-knit.
One of the things that made the jump easy for me was that Reddit’s kind of already devolved to that state. I’ve started to notice that most of Reddit’s content is automatically generated. Bots even synergize to the point where one bot will repost an old top post while other bots repost the top comments from the old post. Lately I’ve been seeing weirdly generic and hollow comments that just look like they came from a pool of sentences, or like they were generated by Chat-GPT. And Reddit has long encouraged this trend such as by admitting they approve of free karma subreddits, solely because they make it easier for new users to circumvent spam filters. I don’t think they care about quality as long as bots are increasing the total user count. It’s a localized example of the dead internet theory.
Even if spez was ousted, all these API changes rolled back, and Reddit never made another decision based on corporate greed, I still just don’t really care for what Reddit’s become. These changes are the simple manifestations of what Reddit’s been aiming to do for years, and I don’t see any reason to stay and hope things get better when they’re already so bad and get invariably worse.